I want to display my article's abstract and table of contents side-by-side, to save space. I'm using the multicols package, but it tries to keep each column the same height, and I can't figure out how to force it to move content into the second column.

Here's a mockup; I'm just padding out the abstract to show what it should look like. The layout is perfect, I just want a way to do this properly:

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{multicols}{2}
\section*{Abstract}
\lipsum[1-2]
a % padding to make the first column run to
% end of page
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a
\tableofcontents
\end{multicols}

And here's what it looks like, rendered (perfect except for the padding lines):

You changed your code after I posted, and it was hard to tell what needed to be done with the old code. You only need \vfill if you want to avoid rubber spacing filling in the extra space. You can turn that off globally with \raggedcolumns -- I'd prefer that to \vfill.
–
frabjousJan 11 '11 at 17:48